Browse by Race & Culture:
Race Discrimination
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A Band of Angels
Deborah Hopkinson
The daughter of a slave forms a gospel singing group and goes on tour to raise money to save for Fisk University.
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A Boy No More
Harry Mazer
After his father is killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adam, his mother, and sister are evacuated from Hawaii to California, where he must deal with his feelings about the war, Japanese internment camps, his father, and his own identity.
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A Friendship for Today
Patrick C. McKissack
In 1954, when desegregation comes to Kirkland, Missouri, ten-year-old Rosemary faces many changes and challenges at school and at home as her parents separate.
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All American Boys
Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
Sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing. Classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who's the older brother of his best friend.
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All the Stars Denied
Guadalupe Garcia McCall
When resentment surges during the Great Depression in a Texas border town, Estrella, fifteen, organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos and soon finds herself with her mother and baby brother in Mexico.
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All We Have Left
Wendy Mills
In interweaving stories of sixteen-year-olds, modern-day Jesse tries to cope with the ramifications of her brother's death on 9/11, while in 2001, Alia, a Muslim, gets trapped in one of the Twin Towers and meets a boy who changes everything for her as flames rage around them.
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A Long Way Home
Saroo Brierley
An account of the author's inspirational effort to find his India birthplace describes how he was accidentally separated from his family in the mid-1980s, his survival on the streets of Calcutta, his adoption by an Australian family, and his headline-making Google Earth search.
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Amelia Westlake
Erin Gough
Harriet Price has the perfect life: she's a prefect at Rosemead Grammar, she lives in a mansion, and her gorgeous girlfriend is a future prime minister. So when she decides to risk it all by helping bad-girl Will Everhart expose the school's many ongoing issues, Harriet tells herself it's because she too is seeking justice. And definitely not because she finds Will oddly fascinating. Will Everhart can't stand posh people like Harriet, but even she has to admit Harriet's ideas are good - and they'll keep Will from being expelled. That's why she teams up with Harriet to create Amelia Westlake, a fake student who can take the credit for a series of provocative pranks at their school. But the further Will and Harriet's hoax goes, the harder it is for the girls to remember they're sworn enemies - and to keep Amelia Westlake's true identity hidden. As tensions burn throughout the school, how far will they go to keep Amelia Westlake - and their feelings for each other - a secret?
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An Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir
Laia is a Scholar living under the iron-fisted rule of the Martial Empire. When her brother is arrested for treason, Laia goes undercover as a slave at the empire's greatest military academy in exchange for assistance from rebel Scholars who claim that they will help to save her brother from execution.
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An Eye for an Eye (Noughts & Crosses, #1.5)
Malorie Blackman
This is a novella in the Noughts & Crosses series, written especially for World Book Day. In a world where the two classes are divided by colour and never treated as equals; Sephy, a Cross and daughter of a top politician, is six months pregnant. The child's father, Callum, is a Nought, but worse, he is dead and Callum's brother is out for revenge. Can two wrongs make a right?
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Anger is a Gift
Mark Oshiro
Six years ago, Moss Jefferies' father was murdered by an Oakland police officer. Along with losing a parent, the media's vilification of his father and lack of accountability has left Moss with near crippling panic attacks. Now, in his sophomore year of high school, Moss and his fellow classmates find themselves increasingly treated like criminals in their own school. New rules. Random locker searches. Constant intimidation and Oakland Police Department stationed in their halls. Despite their youth, the students decide to organize and push back against the administration. When tensions hit a fever pitch and tragedy strikes, Moss must face a difficult choice: give in to fear and hate or realize that anger can actually be a gift.
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Angry Management
Chris Crutcher
Every kid in this group wants to fly. Every kid in this group has too much ballast. Mr. Nak's Angry Management group is a place for misfits. A place for stories. And, man, does this crew have stories. There's Angus Bethune and Sarah Byrnes, who can hide from everyone but each other. Together, they will embark on a road trip full of haunting endings and glimmering beginnings. And Montana West, who doesn't step down from a challenge. Not even when the challenge comes from her adoptive dad, who's leading the school board to censor the article she wrote for the school paper. And straightlaced Matt Miller, who had never been friends with outspoken genius Marcus James. Until one tragic week—a week they'd do anything to change—brings them closer than Matt could have ever imagined.
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Another Way to Dance
Martha Southgate
While spending the summer at the School of American Ballet in New York City, fourteen-year-old Vicki Harris must come to terms with the reality of her parents' divorce, her crush on Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the impact of being an African American on her future as a dancer.
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A Taste of Colored Water
Matt Faulkner
LuLu and Jelly are very excited to see the "colored" water they heard about in the city's water fountain, but are surprised to learn what "colored" water actually means.
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Ball Don't Lie
Matt De La Pena
Sticky is a beat-around-the-head foster kid with nowhere to call home but the street, and an outer shell so tough that no one will take him in. He started out life so far behind the pack that the finish line seems nearly unreachable. He’s a white boy living and playing in a world where he doesn’t seem to belong. But Sticky can ball. And basketball might just be his ticket out . . . if he can only realize that he doesn’t have to be the person everyone else expects him to be.
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Bat 6
Virginia Euwer Wolff
In small town, post-World War Oregon, twenty-one sixth-grade girls recount the story of an annual softball game, during which one girl's bigotry comes to the surface. Set in a small Oregon town just after World War II, this is the powerful tale of a community shattered by its reaction to two young newcomers, Aki and Shazam. Told from 21 different points of view, "Bat 6" explores the subject of Japanese-American racial prejudice after the war. A Japanese American girl who has just spent 6 years in an internment camp meets a bitter girl whose father was killed in Pearl Harbor, and the two become rivals in baseball in this story narrated by the members of the opposing teams.
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Betty Before X
Ilyasah Shabazz and Renée Watson
Raised by her aunt until she is six, Betty, who will later marry Malcolm X, joins her mother and stepfamily in 1940s Detroit, where she learns about the civil rights movement.
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Between Us Baxters
Bethany Hegedus
The story of twelve-year-old Polly, a poor white Southern girl whose close friendship with Timbre Ann, a middle-class black teen, puts both families in danger. As white supremacists set fire to black businesses, Polly struggles to cope with the implications for her family and to understand the true meaning of friendship. Polly's sense of justice threatens to upset the status quo in her small town.
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Black and White
Eric Walters
Thomas meets Denyse after he watches her amazing skills at basketball. As the two become friends, they endure name-calling, cruel glances, and hurtful comments because of the difference of their skin.
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Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America
Ibi Zoboi
Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and featuring some of the most acclaimed best-selling black authors writing for teens today - Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and black in America.
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Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin
The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
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Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
Rebecca Walker
In a memoir about the power of race to share one's personal identity, the daughter of Jewish father and African-American mother recalls her confusing but ultimately rewarding life lived between two conflicting ethnic identities. When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, his mother declared him dead and did not reconcile until after the birth of her first grandchild.
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Blended
Sharon M. Draper
Piano-prodigy Isabella, eleven, whose black father and white mother struggle to share custody, never feels whole, especially as racial tensions affect her school, her parents both become engaged, and she and her stepbrother are stopped by police.
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Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah
Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life....
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Bright April
Marguerite De Angeli
Bright April is set in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. The story addresses the problem of racial prejudice and how children are able to gain understanding and tolerance through their own natural devices.